Reviews
Although part of US cultural and economic history, the role of long-distance sea trade in developing the nation's character and global outlook in the early national period has not been discussed until now. The book is informative and entertaining, a rare combination. Highly recommended.
Often gripping and always engaging. True Yankees makes a very real and highly insightful contribution to our understanding of early America's place within the Pacific world.
An excellent book contributing valuable information on America's early story. Anyone interested in the birth of our nation and how we entered into the world of commerce will find this a detailed resource.
An insightful, well-documented, and immensely significant work for the field of early American history. True Yankees is an excellent and highly important study.
A valuable contribution to our understanding of America’s early encounters with the world.
Educational, interesting, cleverly organized, and easy to read. Morrison presents an aspect of American seafaring and trading history that is commonly overlooked, yet still very significant.
Morrison discerns the beginnings of an American identity in an earlier period of American history by focusing more on the sea than the land through the maritime expansion outwards of the post-Revolutionary and ante-bellum early United States republic. What helps to give the book pace and human engagement is the way in which it is largely based around the lives and travels of a number of key individuals representing different periods and dimensions of what it meant to be what the book's title terms a 'true Yankee.'
Morrison's book is important and impressive. Its point is accurate and significant. It is a work of skillful research, analysis and vision, as well as one that tells an under-appreciated story.
True Yankees: The South Seas & the Discovery of American Identity reflects [Morrison's] high standard of scholarship, as it broadens our understanding of not only New England and maritime commercial and exploration history during the early national period but of a broader topic: identity studies. The publisher has packaged the work attractively in an affordable paperback with appropriate illustrations.
What did it mean to be an independent nation? For New Englanders after the revolution, the answer to that question often lay not on their own shores but in the far-flung waters of the South Seas—in the commodity-rich ports of Canton, Calcutta and Cape Town, and in the oceans in between. As Dane Morrison shows in this important new book, the China Trade was where seafaring Yankees learned how precious their hard-won independence was, where they took the first steps toward having that independence accepted by others, and where they discovered what it meant to be Americans.
True Yankees offers a fresh, insightful, and fascinating perspective on how America’s early voyages of commerce and discovery to the exotic South Seas helped the new nation forge its identity and establish itself on the international stage. This is a book well worth reading.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
Introduction
the first generation
1. Samuel Shaw's Polite Reception, 1784–1794
First Interlude
2. Amasa Delano Opens the Great South Sea, 1790–1820
Second Interlude
3. Edmund Fanning's
Acknowledgments
Introduction
the first generation
1. Samuel Shaw's Polite Reception, 1784–1794
First Interlude
2. Amasa Delano Opens the Great South Sea, 1790–1820
Second Interlude
3. Edmund Fanning's "Voyages Round the World," 1792–1833
Third Interlude
the second generation
Harriett Low in Manila and Macao, 1829–1834
Fourth Interlude
Robert Bennet Forbes and the First Opium War, 1838–1840
Postscript
Notes
Index